Bill James Cy Young Award Predictor

Started browsing through my new baseball book “The Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers” and noticed Matt’s blog entry on Clemens and his slim chances of winning the Cy Young Award due to his low win totals as a result of poor run support from his fellow Astros. Found that the book contained an article by Bill James where he puts forth a formula which attempts to predict the Cy Young Award Voting, and he gets pretty good results from seasons past. The formula is as follows:

Wins times 6
minus Losses times 2
plus Strikeouts divided by 12
plus Saves times 2.5
plus Shutouts
plus Runs Saved ( runs not allowed by the pitcher, compared to a pitcher with a 5.00 ERA ((5*IP/9)-ER) )
plus 12 points for pitching for a first place team.

I decided to compute the numbers for the top 25 starters ranked by ERA, and the top 10 relievers ranked by Saves, and see where Clemens came out in the prediction:

James’ formula seems to predict, as expected, that the voters will place far too much emphasis on Win totals, as it predicts that Clemens, who is having an awesome season, will finish fourth in the Cy Young Award voting, well behind the winner, Chris Carpenter.

Later,
Tom

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About The Author

Tom Diesman is a Cincinnati area native and grew up in Northern Kentucky and Clermont County. He currently resides in central Indiana. Tom makes his living doing UNIX System and Storage Administration. He fell in love with baseball and the Cincinnati Reds during the Big Red Machine era, and Johnny Bench is his all-time favorite Reds player. Tom is still an avid follower of the Reds, and longs for the organization to bring winning baseball back to Cincinnati.

I meant to expand on Runs Saved for you in the original post, but neglected to. James describes it as “runs not allowed by the pitcher, compared to a pitcher with a 5.00 ERA” As noted on the bottom of the very cool ESPN site that Rich provided, it is calculated as ((5*IP/9)-ER).

Had to share this with others, who might get a chuckle out of it like I did.

“The Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers” has a sectiion called the “Pitcher Census”. It has an entry for just about every MLB player you can think of with some basic information on each, the coolest part is, they list pitches thrown by each. So I’m browsing this section, on my way to look up Chad’s favorite Red’s pitcher, Tom Browning, when I happen across the following entry:

I’m betting Neyer on this, Rob is in my SABR group and he has a dry sense of humor (very Midwest) and I have exchanged emails over the years with him on his other Charlie Brown reference he occasionally tosses out when he has mentioned CB’s favorite player, Joe Schlabotnik.

Only Pitch: Fastball (168)
Mets catcher Ronn Reynolds: “A real good fastball will make a sound like ripping silk. But not Finch’s. It just arrives. Or to put it another way, suddenly it’s there. Pft-boom!”
Source: The Curious Case of Sidd Finch (George Plimpton, 1987)
Note: Finch faced fifty-three batters in his brief career, and struck out all fifty-three of them.

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